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It’s that time of year again, people sit around with friends and family reflecting on the year that has past and thinking about the year to come. What are your resolutions for this year? What were your resolutions last year? What resolutions did you achieve or better yet which resolutions did you fail to achieve or even start?

Resolutions can be goals you set for yourself at the start of the year. If you are focused on achieving that goal then you need a plan. A plan is what makes the difference between a goal and a dream. Dream planning doesn’t exist but goal planning does. One of the common ways of planning a goal is to set milestones. These milestones should be specific by being measurable within a specific time frame (see SMART goals).

My 2015 resolutions

Get into trail running

Start a blog about cooking dishes in one pan

Make a book for my friend

For the record I was 0 for 3 of my 2015 resolutions but I would say I was 2 for 3 for achieving my goal in other ways. In other words, the motivation of the goals.

A year is a long time and during that time what you thought was a good goal can change. What is the underlying reason you want to get into trail running? Is it to become a runner? Is it to be healthier? Is it to pick up a sport?

My 2015 resolution motivations

Including cardio exercises in workout – ran a half marathon and now incorporate cardio at the end of weight training

Share information about how to cook dishes faster – start a food blog on pressure cooking

Make a book to learn about typography and setting pages so I learn more about design – did not happen but learnt layout and spacing

When you look at resolutions with the frame of motivations you can allow yourself to adapt to how you change throughout the year. This will help you look back at your year with a better light than regret that you didn’t achieve any goals.

What do UX designers do?

In the past designing software was the challenge but now it is standard. To stand out today, companies need to be designing software for the user. We now compete on user experience. To manage this transition, developers and product teams needed someone to help them get in touch with users. Enter the user experience designer.

Here is a small list of what an user experience designer is expected to do: user research, interviews, usability testing, information architecture, visual design and interaction design. To be an expert in each of those areas would require much time in each area to be proficient.

It’s too broad

With all of the expected tasks, no wonder some job applications for UX designers also include the word “unicorns” and “ninja”. Both are hard to find.

UX designers are all different because they come with different backgrounds. Some are better visual designers, better coders, better system analysts or better strategists. This expectation of knowing broad range of topics but being a specialist in one is known as a T-Shape designer. This means that each of us has our own special skill combination.

This means that one UX designer who did well in one scenario might be unfit for another due to the skill mismatch. It is hard to capture what a UX designer is.

My dilemma with the title “UX designer”

Some say we are the ones in the team who put the user first in our designs but when we design don’t do the actual visuals or code things up. Are we just a bunch of designers who were not technical enough to be developers or not creative enough to be designers?

Are we just a bunch of people who were not technical enough to be developers or not creative enough to be designers?

The world does not exist in grey boxes. It is in colour, it moves. A design that may work well in grey boxes as a concept but may fall apart when the visual design does not work. The design can fall apart when implemented and the experience does not behave as desired. Is it better to describe an interaction in words or as a prototype?

People think that having a UX designers means that they can solve it all. The biggest disservice to the title of “UX designer” is that some designers with this title think they can do it all, even when they can’t. It is worst when they can’t and try push their ideas as gospel because they are the UX designer.

Shouldn’t all of these areas be the responsibility of the whole team rather one single individual?

I feel that the way UX designer works overlaps with what a business analyst, information architect, product manager, user researcher, visual designer or interaction designer may do. If your team has all of these roles filled, then you don’t need a UX designer.

What can UX designers do now?

If you still want to call yourself a UX designer, it is time to get real. Do you do strategic planning, product management, user research, interaction design or content strategy?

UX designers that I have worked with are creative, highly logical and systematic thinkers but we need to ask ourselves, What are you good at? What are you not good at?

Stop presenting designs with lines like “I think” or “I feel” without with evidence or data to back it up.

If you say you focus on the user, then do it. Doing user research is a real thing. Go out and talk to users. Go out and get data. Without it you are just pretending to know. Empower members of the team to make the right decisions by giving them the right motives. Share the results in a way that each person on the team can understand. Long reports and documents mean nothing if no one reads them.

True collaboration

There is a need for teams understand their users. User research is fundamental for product managers to set the direction for the right product. UX designers can help by facilitating methods and activities that get the team thinking about the user better. Is design thinking different than normal thinking?

Is design thinking different than normal thinking?

Whenever we disappear to go sketch without getting people involved, we are doing it wrong. Whenever we design something without caring how it will be implemented, we are doing it wrong. We should be facilitators rather than dictators.

How can you add value by to your team with actionable information about the user today?

What’s next for me?

In a few years time, I don’t think the role of UX designer will exist. My hope is that all members of a team will be contributing to improving the experience for users.

I enjoy coding because it allows me to make digital things with both hardware and software. I studied computer engineering at the University of Waterloo then I was a developer for 8 years. I worked on software which dealt with automotive manufacturing to investment banking. However coding wasn’t the favourite part of my job. The part of the job that I enjoyed the most was gathering information on the business problem and working on what the solution should be.

In an enterprise environment the role of gathering of business information was designated to the business analyst. I did that for a while and produced documents which listed the functional and non functional requirements. Although I learnt a lot about the business, I was missing out on the other side of the applications — the users.

What inspired me?

Most designers I worked with, I never saw. I gave them the requirements and they gave me a design back. The designs missed out the real purpose and was just putting the lipstick on my Visio diagrams. I didn’t like this process but was there a better way?

This all changed when I worked closely with one designer who did interviews and workshops with users before he even touched Illustrator. He gathered information about the business and produced documents in a visual manner with sketches and wireframes. The business were more responsive in reviewing the requirements of the project and provided more insight on what their needs were. I wanted to create the same collaborative process.

My colleague recommended that I read Undercover UX by Cennydd Bowles and James Box. This book was helpful by showing me where and how I can incorporate user experience design processes into a process which did not have it initially.

What did I have to do?

Over the next two years I refined my process as a developer to include some of these practices of sketching, wireframing, interviews and workshops in my day to day role. I knew I was doing something right when traders who are strapped for time were asking for wireframes so that they can discuss concepts for new features. Working in this environment also meant that I didn’t create huge amounts of documents but just the necessary ones.

The next step was making the jump from developer to designer. All I had at the moment were financial trading applications, how could I relate this to other types of apps? I needed a wider breadth of experience. I invested personal time into a few personal projects and helped out a start up designing a mobile payment experience. I managed to get a job at an UX agency which focused on financial services.

Once in my new role, I knew there was still much I had to learn. Using different tools like Omnigraffle and Axure were easy to learn but the major ones was handling design critiques, design principles and presentations. Thanks to the feedback from people I have worked with, it has helped me improve along this evolving journey.

How do I feel now?

Moving from being a developer to a designer allowed me to keep solving problems. Instead of the how, I am now approaching problem solving by focusing on the why.

There are a lot of similarities and parallels between the worlds between business analysis and UX designer. User stories and system diagrams versus personas and experience maps. Data flows versus user flows. For a while we have treated these activities as being separate worlds. But the software we build have those two sides — the business and the user. One can’t be without the other. It is one product.

The biggest lesson to date for me is that UX design cannot be done alone. It requires business, technology and user research to come up with the right user experience. This makes me wonder how this industry will evolve in the future as we become more collaborative.

For more stories of other UX designers who came from a development background, here is an excellent write up from Boon Chew about his journey.

In my early design interviews, I was asked “What makes good design”, I answered “Good design is design that create delight”. Coming from the development world looking into the world of design that’s what I thought. I was wrong.

“Good design is design that creates delight.”

Delight to me were the little animations that appear in page to pre-filling a form on a page. But are these moments of delight good design if the overall experience had no purpose?

As a developer I was copying the latest trends in design when designing my user interfaces. Round and shiny buttons? Yup did that. Flat design? Yup did that. Following these trends taught me how to use design tools better. I thought that if I knew how to create the latest designs then I would get validation on Behance or Dribbble that I was a good designer. But is it good design if people like the way it looks?

Design is about more than just aesthetics. So what makes it good or bad? How do you evaluate design?

As a hobby I like to cook. Watching how the great chefs describe how they cook and how they can make simple ingredients shine. Every ingredient brings a certain flavour to the dish. Every ingredient has a purpose.

Design hypotheses focuses the design so that each decision to add or remove an element has to contribute to solving the problem. If it is not helping solving the problem, then it has no purpose. If it has no purpose then why have it?

“Good design solves problems”

This way of approaching design works no matter if you are working with shiny buttons or flat ones. Delight can only come after you first make the design useful.

In our world today, we are focused on being digital but it is important to remember that when we interact with things – we do it physically.

We are made to make

Making things allows us to tap into our natural ability to shape and make things

If you look at babies, they touch everything they can with their hands and feet. It is a way of how they are learning about the world. What is also happening is that over time babies are honing the motor skills needed to make things. Our hands have fingers and opposable thumbs. Over time our hands helps us grip things like tools (hammers) and the allow us the finesse to have fine motor skills so that we can use a needle and thread.

How we use these tools to shape and transform material can be done categorised in 3 ways:

Adding – combines or connects materials together.
Here you can think of using screws to hold pieces of wood together or glueing on pieces of paper to make some arts and crafts

Subtraction removes materials
Craving/engraving that special message in a ring for your love ones.

Transforming is altering the states of materials.
An example of this is glass blowing. The most common example of this is cooking and baking.

Our ability to use various tools allows us to make various things.

Making things allows us to apply our own personal knowledge of the world

As we grow up from babies to adults. We learn things of about the world from chemistry, physics of how materials works. As we see things being made we build a desire to make those things ourselves

An example of this is with Great British Bake Off. Baking is based on great flavours as well as chemistry.
There is a direct correlation that after an episode of Bakeoff and the rush of people trying to make the same cakes. Waitrose saw an increase of 881% with baking tray sales after an episode.

However if you tried baking anything the first time it may not be as good as what you saw. Making things well requires take time to learn and master that ability. At times it can bring you joy and at times can be utter frustration. Each of these moment contributes to the learning process, Along the way as our personal knowledge improves and it gives us the confidence to be able to shape a material and say ‘I made that’.

Making things yourself allows you to share a piece of you with world

Flat pack furniture like Ikea furniture is common in most homes. We all get the same materials and instructions. Some people they like to put their own spin on the product with the knowledge of the material and tools. They are able to customise their the flat pack furniture into something new.

What was a shelf is now a door, what was a door is now a table. These new creations are shared online to inspire others to make.

But you don’t have to start making with big things. You can start with small things today:

A hand written thank you note

Customising a gift with engravings

Adding goggly eyeballs on to fruit to make someone laugh

When you share the things you make, you share a piece of your personality in something people can hold on to.

Making is the most powerful way that we can express ideas and shape our world.

I went to the London office of ustwo to listen a panel talk about introducing agile to big business. I enjoyed the event, good drinks and food and friendly staff were around to chat. The panel was a good mix of people who worked with agile in startups, large organisations, government and traditional businesses that use waterfall.

Below are notes that I took during the panel discussions

Agile doesn’t have to be done strictly as one style, take the best

You are not agile or agile, you only become more agile

Adopting agile is not easy and it doesn’t guarantee anything

Changing how people think and work… Can be hard

Is agile for everyone? -> Yes but different personalities of people can require adjustment

Agile can be something that builds the wrong thing quickly

Q: What does agile means? Ability to change, communication

What is the least we can do to get most learnings.

The only certain thing is time

Agile requires building trust

Build it, show it. Then decide to either go forward or scrap

You are not locked to a bad idea/concept with agile

Workshops can help build trust at the beginning. Share your learnings by playing back to stakeholders

How to start with agile: You don’t need to wait. Start small, ground up. Ground up hits a limit of adoption within organisation. To make agile stick, everyone needs to be involved

In the questioning period there was a discussion on how to manage senior stakeholders who have expertise and want to deliver their vision even if these features do not resonant well with users.

Take them along the journey

Use data and research to back up your decisions

Building things with user needs alone you can miss the big picture. If you ask what people want then they want more efficient versions of reality. Instead of making a knee jerk reaction, we want to find out the why they want that – analyse their needs. Otherwise you could end up building the Homer car.

The definition of done is core to agile but can you have multiple levels of done? I came across this blog article that expresses this idea.

Seems like if you don’t know exactly what you are building then this method works. With development you have clear criteria of what needs to be done but design can be more subjective. Not every task with the design process results in the same output. Sometimes it is exploration and it is the learnings that are results. Sometimes it is design assets and it is the actual assets that are the results.

How can you apply a single definition of done to such different outputs?

Most of the comments from the blog article didn’t agree with Mike Cohn (the author) but I agree with him.